Unquestionably
the beheading of Nick Berg was a heinous act. However, it is not
enough to focus only on the gruesomeness of Berg’s execution and
those who carried out the heinous act. There is namely the
question of what Berg was doing in Iraq? As the Guardian
notes, this story has yet to “fully emerge.” (1)

Berg is described as
a “friendly guy,” an “oddity,” a pro-war believer in the
occupation of Iraq. (2)

So why was Berg in
Iraq? Andy Duke, a US businessman in Iraq, told the Guardian,
“He was here for the very simple reason that for a telecoms guy
this was a golden age. In the month he was here I would estimate
he made $70,000.”

Yet the violence
meted out to Berg stands in antipodal contradiction to the
relative benignity shown American Thomas Hamill by his captors.
(3) Which was the isolated case? In the case of
Berg, his executioners are self-professedly linked to an alleged
Jordanian associate of al Qaeda, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. If this is
indeed true then do Iraqis bear more responsibility for a renegade
foreign group than Americans would bear for a group of Canadians
run amuck south of their border?

Ostensibly the timing
was most propitious for US authorities reeling from the news of
sadomasochistic humiliation, torture, rape, and killing in the
occupation torture centers. Not only is it apparent that these
egregious acts are not “isolated” at Abu Ghraib, but they are
institutionalized (4) in other Iraqi camps
(5), in Afghan detention centers,
(6) and at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere. (7)
It is concomitant with historical US warfare. (8)
As elected US representatives look aghast at the latest horrific
pictures to come out of Iraq, the never-justified occupation was
wilting, faced by a people who only want the occupiers to
leave forthwith. Then suddenly the American public’s attention is
diverted elsewhere.

BJ Sabri, an
Iraqi-American writer who “abhors such macabre violence” muses on
whether this could have been staged to implicate others. He asks,
“If someone wants to avenge ... especially in the Middle East,
all Arabs and Muslims have a code of conduct that came from
Babylon: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Then why did
those guys decapitate Berg instead of performing abuses similar to
those of the Americans?”

“No one ever heard of
this group ... that was the first and the last so far ... and they
never said what they wanted after the killing?”

He concludes, “There
is a great chance that this was a very well planned act.”

Nonetheless, Sabri
explores the execution as an entity in itself.

“From the viewpoint
of killing, why is killing by decapitation worse than killing by
bullets or bombs? The French executed by this
method until 1972. The Saudis still do it. The Americans did it in
Vietnam, including the severing of testicles.”

“About sensitivities,
when the US dropped its daisy cutter bombs on the
al-Amariyah shelter the entire
shelter population of 1500 plus went into a million pieces and
their remains and body parts are splattered all over the walls
that visitors can see up until now.”

The decapitation
repulses Americans because they can see it. The Iraqi casualties
are not discussed. In fact they are covered up. The corporate
media is complicit in censoring the pornography of war.
(9) Yet when the pornography of war serves the
desired ends of warmongers different rules come into play.

Says Sabri, “This
incident must be investigated before judgment can fly. It
testifies to extreme callous cruelty, but killing
tens-of-thousands of people and destroying the future of the
remaining population, for imperialist reasons, is even more
cruel.”

The outpouring of
grief for one slain American stands in stark testimony to
Americans’ insouciance to myriad Iraqi deaths. Surely, morality
does not sublimate the untoward fate that befell a man reportedly
motivated by cupidity to the catastrophe of a nation.

A Chilean journalist
in Iraq said of Berg: “It was just an adventure for him. He told
me: ‘I had bad luck. Shit happens.’ He was a tough guy.”
[italics added] (10)

War is an unbounded
force that submits to no one.

Kim Petersen
is a writer living in Nova Scotia, Canada. He can be reached at:
kimpete@start.no.